A compact container or package for containing and storing items, such as tablets, doses of medicine, or the like, is disclosed, and more particularly, hand-held rectangular slide pill dispensers and rotary pill dispensers, each providing child-resistant, senior-friendly dispensing properties, are disclosed.
Individuals may rely on multi-compartment pill boxes in order to merge their daily prescriptions and vitamin/mineral supplements. These multi-compartment boxes enable the user to fill them on a periodic basis, e.g. weekly, and then when in use, the box marked with the days of the week and/or time of day assists the user in ensuring that the appropriate pills are taken.
Pill dispensers enable users to dispense a single pill or other solid unit dosage form periodically, e.g., daily. By way of example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,069,942 issued to Marshall et al. discloses a substantially disc-shaped refillable dispenser and U.S. Pat. No. 4,555,044 issued to Pearo discloses a disc-shaped pill dispenser having a rotating cover with a dispensing aperture. Examples of other disc-shaped dispensers are provided by U.S. Pat. No. 3,984,031 issued to Thompson, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,078,661 and 4,124,143 issued to Thomas, U.S. Pat. No. 4,164,301 issued to Thayer, U.S. Pat. No. 6,325,241 B1 issued to Garde et al., U.S. Pat. No. 7,147,127 B2 issued to Lepke et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 7,243,797 B2 issued to Donegan.
Although the packages disclosed by the above referenced patents may be suitable for their intended purposes, there is a need for a dispenser that is of novel construction enabling efficient and inexpensive manufacture and assembly. The package should be useful in consumer packaging applications, for instance, packaging of pharmaceuticals or unit dose pharmaceuticals that may require repeated dispensing of doses of medicine over a period of time until the course of medication is complete. The packages should enable a user to easily track the consumption of doses according to a prescribed schedule and should provide a so-called child resistance (CR) rating of F=1 to ensure that the package has sufficient integrity to prevent unwanted access of the medicine by a young child in the event that a young child accidentally gains possession of the package. Although the package should have child-resistance dispensing properties, it should also enable ready dispensing by an intended end-user, such as a senior citizen.